Friday, November 02, 2007
Back story
Were you satisfied with the background provided about the boy's mother? Or did you feel it needed to be fleshed out a little more? Did you have a good sense of the man's feelings for that woman? I sometimes sensed a great longing in him but also a strange forgetting. Maybe that was part of this great truth that many things in the world simply did not exist anymore and their profound absence was almost like they had never really existed to begin with.
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7 comments:
I think you're right. And also maybe that it was hard enough to endure that life and remembering past love and happiness was an unpleasant distraction. The man's leaving his wife's picture lying in the road was very telling.
To answer your question, I think I would've liked to see the wife fleshed out a bit more. What we got was sufficient, but I found those parts really interesting and would've liked more.
Yes, good point about leaving the picture. That was a turning point.
How important was that relationship to the story, really? Wasn't the mother simply background to make the father's love and determination stand out all the more?
She chose death over enduring the hell of living for the sake of the boy.
I'm not sure what to make of the mother. Part of me sees her as a realist (Who wants to face hunger and pain and cold and constant fear? Who wants to face the near certainty of being sexually assaulted or having your child be assaulted? We are going to die a horrible death eventually, probably sooner than later, so why not now?)
And part of me sees her as a coward. (Who could abandon the boy? Who could not try if for no other reason than her loved ones want her to try? Who could add a suicide to the misery they already endure?)
But, for literary reasons, it makes sense that she is gone. It throws the father's love into high relief, as you noted. It makes their relationship one-to-one. There aren't two adults who may have different notions about how to procede. The boy has no "rival" for the man's affection. Sex, which might have been a complication, is just a long-dead dream.
McCarthy could have easily had her killed or die a natural death, though. He clearly wanted an example of someone in the story who intentionally opted out.
Yeah, the suicide thing was definitely purposeful. It helped set up the man's internal conflict about the two bullets in the gun and whether he would have the courage to kill the boy and himself if the alternative became too dire.
The two bullets thing was amazing.
And remember when the boy forgot the gun on the beach? And they had to go look for it? My first weird thought was not how will they protect themselves, but how will they kill themselves?
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